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McCarthy Claims People From Yemen, Iran Are Crossing Southern Border Into U.S.
Posted
March 15, 2021
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0:43Now PlayingRepublican members of Congress trooped to the U.S.-Mexico border Monday to put a spotlight on a surge of migrants at the frontier that they say is the result of President Joe Biden’s shift from the hardline immigration policies of his predecessor.
Less than two months into Biden’s term, both parties are already framing their messages on immigration -- a perennial political flashpoint -- for the 2022 election to decide control of the House and Senate.
Speaking at an El Paso, Texas, detention center built last year, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said Biden should be there instead of traveling to tout the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill he signed into law last week. The facility has exceeded its 1,040-person capacity, McCarthy said, claiming that migrants are encouraged by Biden’s pledge to offer a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.
“This crisis is created by the policies of this new administration,” McCarthy said at a news conference with a dozen other Republican House lawmakers. “There’s no other way to claim it than a Biden border crisis.”
During President Donald Trump’s time in office, high-profile Democrats such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren used trips to the border to draw attention to the squalid conditions for asylum seekers and people caught crossing the border illegally. It was, they argued, the purposeful result of Trump’s harsh policies.
The point and counterpoint of such trips illustrate just how far apart Democrats and Republicans have moved from any consensus on what to do about an immigration system that both sides agree is broken and in need of a fix.
Biden campaigned on a pledge of offering more assistance to those seeking refugee status in the U.S. Republicans say he is embracing an “open borders” approach that includes undoing a Trump administration program that sent thousands of asylum seekers back to Mexico until their immigration court hearings.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week it is “absolutely incorrect” to refer to Biden’s policy as open borders, adding that the “vast majority of individuals apprehended or encountered at the border continue to be denied entry and are returned.”
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